"WALLERSTEIN'S SOLUTION TO THE SUPPOSED OPPRESSION BY THE CORE NATIONS IS THE CREATION OF A SOCIALIST WORLD GOVERNMENT......"

-RICHARD HEATHEN

HOW NEO-MARXISM HAS INFILTRATED INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

PUBLISHED: 11th July, 2018 | By Richard Heathen

Neo-Marxism is the globalist ideology promoted by many world leaders in the West as documented here. But how did this world view become so prevalent, and where does this obsession with the deconstruction of national sovereignty come from? The fact is that internationalism is part and parcel of Marxist ideology, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the field of international relations, has in many ways, been hijacked by the neo-Marxist point of view.

For those who don’t know, Marxism began to mutate and take on a new form in the middle part of the 20th century. Due to the failed predictions of Marx, namely no communist revolution in industrialized Western countries, adherents to his ideology began to rethink, and recontextualize his ideas. The result was a fundamental shift which transformed Marxism into Neo-Marxism. While Neo-Marxism shifted away from anarrow focus on economic classes, such as bourgeoisie and proletariate,it still contextualized it’s view of the world through the idea of a oppressor and victim. What changed was how that dichotomy was defined, whether it’s between men and women, white people and minorities or first world, and third world countries. These were the criteria of neo-Marxist thought, which were different depending on the focus of the Marxist theorists, yet often overlapped.

Unlike classical Marxism, neo-Marxism isn’t one cohesive over all theory, but instead many different schools of thought with many theoretical offshoots. One of which was World Systems Theory (which we’ll get to later). World Systems Theory evolved out of another theory called Dependency Theory, which was founded by Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch. Known as the Latin American Keynes (in reference to influential British economist John Maynard Keynes), Raúl Prebisch served as the founding secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and was a liberal reformer, not a Marxist.He argued that developing countries export raw materials to developed countries, who then turn these materials into manufactured goods and sell them back to the poorer developing countries. Prebisch argued that it was impossible for undeveloped countries to fully develop because manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials.

Soon after, Marxists like Andre Gunder Frank began to infiltrate and inject Marxism in to Dependancy Theory. Frank argued that the world capitalist system was a tool that the Western World used to exploit the people and resources of the poorer parts of the world such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Gunder Frank argued that this exploitive relationship condemned the poorer nations of the world into perpetual poverty.

“underdevelopment was and still is generated by the very same historical process which also generated economic development: the development of capitalism itself”

Later Immanuel Wallerstein, another Marxist theorist came along and added to Dependancy Theory, creating World Systems Theory. World Systems Theory divided the world up into 3 regions, the core, periphery and semi-periphery. The core nations represent the industrialized world, countries like the US, Canada, and Western Europe etc. Core nations are those with the highest industrialized and strongest economies and militaries. Their economic dominance allows them to them out compete the periphery and semi-periphery countries. The periphery countries are the nations with the poorest, least industrially developed countries. The countries categorized as periphery by World System (i.e. neo-Marxist) theorists include Afghanistan, Cambodia, Morocco, Iraq, as well as many others. The semi-periphery are the countries who are in the process of industrialization which positioned between the core and periphery countries in the World Systems Theory model. Examples of semi-periphery countries include: Mexico, South Africa, and Uruguay.

According to World Systems Theory the core nations use their economic and military dominance to exploit both the semi-periphery, and periphery:

The three structural positions in a world-economy-core, periphery, and semi-periphery-had become stabilized by about 1640… capitalism involves not only appropriation of the surplus-value by an owner from a laborer, but an appropriation of surplus of the whole world-economy by core areas” - Immanuel Wallerstein

The neo-Marxist view ofthe world has infiltrated and subverted how we see many things, and how many of us contextualize the world, and international relations is no exception. The terms first world, third world, and second world are usually used in context of poor undeveloped countries vs developed rich countries, and those in between. This is analogous of Wallersteins distinctions of core, periphery, and semi-periphery countries. The original usage for these terms however, actuallyhas it’s roots in the political divisions of the world during the Cold War. French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the terms to refer to what was then, the political landscape. With the first world being the nations that were allied with the US and NATO, the second world nations referred to the communist and socialist nations allied with the USSR and the Communist Block, and the third world nations that were allied to neither. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the usage of these terms inexplicably began to change where they became more or less synonmonus with Wallersteins World Systems Theory, ironically used by layman, most of whom have probably never heard of the Wallerstein, the origin of the term, nor how it had been shifted in the public consciousness to fit, and subtly promote a neo-Marxist point of view.

World Systems Theory posits that only 2 kinds of world systems have ever existed: world economies and world empires, and that we are living in a global world capitalist economy. Global empires have one international economy and one political system, where world economies have more than one centre of power, but also just one economic system, and that the capitalist system we have today itself is just a continuation of exploitation of the other parts of the world by Europeans, and that slavery only ended as it was rendered obsolete after industrialization and economically unviable once Africa joined the international system. Wallerstein's solution to the supposed oppression by the core nations is the creation of a socialist worldgovernment.

“There are today no socialist systems in the world-economy any more than there are feudal systems because there is only one world-system. It is a world-economy and it is by definition capitalist in form. Socialism involves the creation of a new kind of world-system, neither a redistributive world empire nor a capitalist world-economy but a socialist world-government. I don't see this projection as being in the least utopian but I also don't feel its institution is imminent. It will be the outcome of a long struggle in forms that may be familiar and perhaps in very new forms, that will take place in all the areas of the world-economy (Mao's continual 'class struggle'). Governments may be in the hands of persons, groups or movements sympathetic to this transformation but states as such are neither progressive nor reactionary. It is movements and forces that deserve such evaluative judgments.” - Immanuel Wallerstein, The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System.

Wallerstein referred to the theory by Chinese communist dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong, that communist revolution was a continuing and evolving process even after the establishment of a communist state. According to Mao, even after the achievement of political power, and the transformation of the economy of a nation, the revolution is far from over. This was the justification Mao used for launching the Cultural Revolution.

World Systems Theory is a widely used, interdisciplinary field of study which includes both sociology and international relations.The Journal of World Systems Research is the prominent publication for discussing World Systems Theory, is published by the University of Pittsburgh,and is the official journal of the American Sociological Association. Professor of Sociology at University of California Tanya Golash-Boza is a published author who has received grants by the US Federal Government to fund her work, and writes for the Journal of World Systems Research. She has written several books including Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism, where she bemoans the deportation of criminal illegal aliens. Many write off the universities as simply a den of ideological lunatics, out of touch with the real world. The sad fact though, is that these lunatics are the one’s who end up teaching the young people who go forward and become the people who create and implement policy on the municipal, state/provincial, federal and global level, and the fact is Marxist ideology has thoroughly infiltrated the universities of the West and has gone forward into every area of society.

​World Systems Theory, often overlaps with another neo-Marxist theory known as Critical Theory. Critical theory is the intellectual and ideological root for what is known as political correctness and the social justice movement. It was created by a group of prominently Jewish intellectual from the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt Germany who later immigrated to the US and are commonly known as the Frankfurt School. In the next article of this series we’ll see how neo-Marxism, using critical theory, has deconstructed the ethnic and cultural bonds of Western Civilization, in order to forward their over arching ideological agenda of the creation of a world socialist state.